Opis ebooka At the Mountains of Madness - Howard Phillips Lovecraft

At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections since Lovecraft's death.
Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi describes the novella as representing the decisive "demythology" of the Cthulhu Mythos by reinterpreting Lovecraft's earlier supernatural stories in a science fiction paradigm.

He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the
whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the
lee of vast, silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall
reaching the sky at the world's rim.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy,
horror and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of
science fiction and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror":
the notion that some concepts, entities or experiences are barely
comprehensible to human minds, and those who delve into such risk
their sanity. Lovecraft has become a cult figure in the horror
genre and is noted as creator of the "Cthulhu Mythos," a series of
loosely interconnected fictions featuring a "pantheon" of nonhuman
creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon, a grimoire of magical
rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a tone of "cosmic
pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and powerless in the
universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, and
his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized
as occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over
the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most
important horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting an influence
that is widespread, though often indirect. Source: Wikipedia

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Chapter1

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to
follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my
will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion
of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale
boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more
reluctant because my warning may be in vain.

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable;
yet, if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible,
there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs,
both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are
damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of
the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink
drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures,
notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought
to remark and puzzle over.

In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few
scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient
independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously
convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly
baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence
to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and
over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness.
It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself
and my associates, connected only with a small university, have
little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly
bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.

It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest
sense, specialists in the fields which came primarily to be
concerned. As a geologist, my object in leading the Miskatonic
University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level
specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic
continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank
H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a
pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use
of this new mechanical appliance at different points along
previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort
hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.

Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from
our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability,
and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with
the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to
cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed
rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting
paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping
for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all
formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three
seven-dog sledges could carry. This was made possible by the clever
aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned.
Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and
with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by
Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the
edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points,
and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve
us.

We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season -
or longer, if absolutely necessary - would permit, operating mostly
in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea;
regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott,
and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aeroplane and
involving distances great enough to be of geological significance,
we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material -
especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of
antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to
obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous
rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of ice and
death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's
past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even
tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the
lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge
are the only survivals, is a matter of common information; and we
hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail.
When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge
the aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable
size and condition.

Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out
by the upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed, or
nearly exposed, land surfaces - these inevitably being slopes and
ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice
overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling
the depth of any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though
Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in
thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with
current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan - which we
could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition
such as ours - that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition
proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our
return from the antarctic.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our
frequent wireless reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated
Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We
consisted of four men from the University - Pabodie, Lake of the
biology department, Atwood of the physics department - also a
meteorologist - and myself, representing geology and having nominal
command - besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from
Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve
were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent
wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with
compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of
course, our two ships - wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice
conditions and having auxiliary steam - were fully manned.

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special
contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were
extremely thorough, despite the absence of great publicity. The
dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of
our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were
loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific
purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen,
transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent
example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant
predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these
predecessors which made our own expedition - ample though it was -
so little noticed by the world at large.

As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on
September 2nd, 1930, taking a leisurely course down the coast and
through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart,
Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of
our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before,
hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains - J. B. Douglas,
commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea
party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic -
both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.

As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and
lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon
each day. At about 62° South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs
- table-like objects with vertical sides - and just before reaching
the antarctic circle, which we crossed on October 20th with
appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with
field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after
our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for
the worse rigors to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric
effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid
mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became
the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive
nor thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°,
East Longitude 175° On the morning of October 26th a strong land
blink appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill
of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain
chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last
we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and
its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the
Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to
round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to
our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of
the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9'.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great
barren peaks of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as
the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing
southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the
white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed
granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging,
intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences
sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient
musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which
for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and
even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the
strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of
the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly
fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of
the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I
had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college
library.

On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been
temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day
descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead,
with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now
stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice
barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet
like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward
navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off
the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak
towered up some twelve thousand, seven hundred feet against the
eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama, while
beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten
thousand, nine hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a
volcano.

Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the
graduate assistants - a brilliant young fellow named Danforth -
pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope, remarking
that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the
source of Poe's image when he wrote seven years later:

- the lavas that restlessly roll

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek

In the ultimate climes of the pole -

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek

In the realms of the boreal pole.

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked
a good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the
antarctic scene of Poe's only long story - the disturbing and
enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the
lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins
squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible
on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly
drifting ice.

Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross
Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a
line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload
supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on
first treading Antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even
though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton
expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the
volcano's slope was only a provisional one, headquarters being kept
aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs,
sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental
ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial, aeroplane
parts, and other accessories, including three small portable
wireless outfits - besides those in the planes - capable of
communicating with the Arkham's large outfit from any part of the
antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's
outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press
reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on
Kingsport Head, Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work during
a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible, we would
winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the
freezing of the ice for another summer's supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published
about our early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful
mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular
speed with which Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even
through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small
ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier
with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge
aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land
party - twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs - was
remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really
destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the
thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our
experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of
this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be
a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other
supplies.

Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual
exploring material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men
from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us
from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost. Later,
when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would
employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this
cache and another permanent base on the great plateau from six
hundred to seven hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier.
Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and
tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense
with intermediate bases, taking our chances in the interest of
economy and probable efficiency.

Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour,
nonstop flight of our squadron on November 21st over the lofty
shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed
silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only
moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one
opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between
Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier,
the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea
was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast line. At
last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the
ultimate south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of Mt.
Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost
fifteen thousand feet.

The successful establishment of the southern base above the
glacier in Latitude 86° 7', East Longitude 174° 23', and the
phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at
various points reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane
flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant
ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students -
Gedney and Carroll - on December 13 - 15. We were some eight
thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level, and when experimental
drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the
snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the
small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at
many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing
mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones
thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was
homogeneous, with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but
somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South
America - which we then thought to form a separate and smaller
continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross
and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the
hypothesis.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after
boring revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting
fossil markings and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites,
crinoids, and such mollusks as linguellae and gastropods - all of
which seemed of real significance in connection with the region's
primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated
marking, about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake pieced
together from three fragments of slate brought up from a
deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came from a point to the
westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist,
seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and
provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some
of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks.
Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a
sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself
produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I
saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.

On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six
students, and myself flew directly over the south pole in two of
the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind,
which, fortunately, did not develop into a typical storm. This was,
as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights,
during others of which we tried to discern new topographical
features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early
flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though they
afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and
deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had
given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the
sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would
dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams
and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun.
On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the
tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical
opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the
two.

At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying
five hundred miles eastward with all four exploring planes and
establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on
the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it.
Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes
of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent - lime
juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food,
and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our
thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we
might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious
wintering through the long antarctic night. Several savage
windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped
damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary
aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and
reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck
and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.

The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told
also of Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward - or
rather, northwestward - prospecting trip before our radical shift
to the new base. It seems that he had pondered a great deal, and
with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated
marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in
nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the
utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the
west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently
belonged. He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print
of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of
considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock
which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date - Cambrian if not
actually pre-Cambrian - as to preclude the probable existence not
only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the
unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with
their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a
thousand million years old.